Fire Action! Tour - Day Three (Monday)

Bristol - 12:00

The sun is out again, although not with quite the same force as we felt it in Oxford. I'd have liked to use the next few hours to explore - I hear Isambard Brunel built an impressive suspension bridge nearby - but the cheap shoes I bought yesterday are fighting against my unusually shaped feet and, at the moment, winning, leaving the heels and tops of my feet feeling something like good carpaccio: raw and tender. So instead I'm sitting on a bench just off the High Street, outside a Methodist church that lays claim to some kind of historical significance, while some cheery whistling workmen paint the wall behind me a not completely repulsive shade of lime green.

Fire Action! Tour - Day Two (Sunday)

Oxford - 16:00

Day two of the tour and there's time to kill in Oxford before we drive to Bristol. In an attempt to blend in with the natives I've bought a pretentious Moleskine notebook and taken refuge from the day's scorching heat under a tree in Christ Church meadow. It would probably be sensible to find a more secluded spot than I have - tourists pour down the wide pebble dashed path almost constantly, eager to gawp at the university's golden monuments to intellectualism or the cows in the field ahead of me - but the poser in me quite enjoys imagining I might be a source of fascination to passersby with my furrowed brow and look of intense concentration. Besides, it's not long before the repetitive crunch of footsteps on gravel becomes faintly reassuring- like the sound of rain on a pane of glass.

"...Lit a Fire..."

1. Admire faraway paradise.
2. Start building bridge to farwaway paradise.
3. Spend ten years building bridge.
4. Forget where bridge was supposed to lead.
5. Burn bridge down.

Finally reached stage five today.

Seven Lessons of the Stag

In the summer of last year I went on my first proper lads' stag weekend. For some reason I wrote but never got around to posting the following list of lessons I learnt from that debaunched weekend in Nottingham.

Lesson One
Indoor golf is no more fun than outdoor golf.

Lesson Two
Black Jack is not a game of skill.

Lesson Three
Getting 60% accuracy against clay pigeons while armed with a 12-gauge shotgun makes you feel 60% more manly.

Lesson Four
Lapdances are almost worth the asking price.

Lesson Five
A gang of 16 guys have zero chance of getting into a club at 2am.

Lesson Six
You can always find one scummy over-crowded bar that will serve anyone 'til 4am.

Lesson Seven
There's less cruelty involved in the making of a beef burger than a chicken burger.

Doom & Gloom

To its harshest critics, the Sunday Papers on hip PC games blog Rock Paper Shotgun is just a clique-ish list of articles from the pens of Kieron Gillen's mates. I reckon that sort of criticism is pretty unfair and untrue, and I suspect those who suggest such things are mostly just envious of Gillen's massive influence over the nature and direction of videogame debate. (But y'know, OBVIOUSLY now that I've defended him on these trend-making pages, I'll be pretty outraged if he doesn't link to something of mine in the next couple of weeks.)

Ahem.

Doom

I'm in a funny mood. As anyone who read my painfully self-conscious previous blog post might have noticed, I was unusually pleased with the last couple of "proper" articles I wrote- one on Arkham Asylum and the other on Mass Effect 2. Yet now a few days have passed and my poor fragile ego has taken a battering from the ZERO total comments posted on them both. Every article I've ever written for A. N. Other game site has, until this point, ALWAYS received at least one comment. Even this dull review of an even duller game I did ages ago. Then I go write a couple of the best pieces I've ever written and no-one seems to give a damn.

What's that about?

Gloom

Spread too thin?

I always had high hopes for myself. I bought into the lie they tell you at school that “you can do anything if you set your mind to it”, and then sat around waiting for my mind to get set on something. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

For a while I thought it was music that would make me “special”, or at the very least, give me an excuse to slack off at university:

“Why bother getting a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s 9am economic anthropology class, when instead I could stay up and help write a song that defines our generation? Now pass the red wine and the reefer and play me that second verse again...”

As attractive as that lifestyle was, when I turned from my late-teens to early-twenties, doubts set in. Despite talks with promoters and producers who’d say all the right things about how “relevant” they thought our sound was, the Dakar Rally fan-base never extended much beyond friends of friends with nothing better to do. There came a point when persuading people to come to the next gig was my main reason for wanting to go out and meet people, and I found myself keeping in contact with those I otherwise found uninspired and uninteresting just to chase an elusive half-promise they once made to “come see you guys play sometime”. I had, in the words of Vincent Vincent & the Villains, “turned into someone that I didn’t like- and that’s no fun”.

So it’s against this back-drop of having tried and failed at a grand plan for the future (and allowing myself to become a self-serving, sycophant-seeker in the process) that I’m left wondering: what next? What can I do to escape the quagmire of life as a bored paper-pushing public servant, who relieves his creative frustrations by sporadically updating a seldom-read blog?

Q. Is a bland picture better than no picture at all?

These seem like the options:

a) Accept life as a fed-up, paper-pushing public servant. Keep drinking too much, never get laid, and occasionally go to karaoke bars with other grumpy paper-pushing public servants to sing Hard-Fi’s “Living for the Weekend” or ”Working for a Cash Machine” or any other song that’s horrible but helps you to connect with everyone around you who’s also boring, bored and miserable.

b) Stop writing self-indulgent rubbish like this, and write something people might actually want to read. Start a new blog with a narrower focus, which is easy to update regularly. Take up those offers to write for the Worship Street Irregulars and Savy Gamer, and build up a decent portfolio of varied writing. Learn more about proper journalism.

c) Have a go at music again. Get back into the habit of playing the guitar for at least an hour a day. Learn the interesting scales, rhythms and licks you never got around to last time, and get better at improvising. Persuade the talented but nervous musicians around you to get involved, and do something genuinely interesting with it. Maybe start a band called “the Sycophant Seekers”.

d) Work to develop a popular application for the iPhone. Use that app as a springboard for establishing a profitable business, working alongside your friends on something you’re in control of and truly believe in. Get bought out by Google for $100,000,000,000 before the age of 30 and retire into the sunset, using the money to live a life of sophisticated but modest pleasures, while anonymously but informedly donating to worthy charities.

My instinct is to answer “e) all of the above”, but is that in any way realistic? How will I be able to keep scheduling four hours a day for playing videogames and watching tv while juggling those kind of ambitions?

Oh. Is that the answer?

An English Gentleman's Guide to the bars and clubs of Cervino

Skiing holidays are sick, really. And I don't mean "sick" in the (snow-boarding?) sense of "radical" or "gnarly" or "good". I mean: disgusting, indulgent, bourgeois, environmentally unfriendly and terrifyingly expensive. But just in case you're as despicable as me and decide one day to go to Cervino in Italy for a skiing holiday, here's a woefully researched guide to help you decide where to spend your evenings.

The Matterhorn, a fairly famous mountain that can be seen from Cervino

The Dragon & Thistles: An English theme pub. Do you want to fly hundreds of miles for a Guiness that costs 7 Euros? Or for a ropey Italian covers band that plays trite English songs badly? Or maybe you're nostalgic for stingy 25ml spirit measures? Assuming you're sensible enough to answer 'no' to all those questions, this place ought to be avoided.


Gasoline: Arguably has the most beautiful barmaid in town, but there's little else to recommend it. Bland, big-beat, Euro-pop, synth-nonsense is played too loudly; it's all a bit cramped; and the beer is priced at a fairly average but still expensive 5 Euros. We never had the desire to stay past midnight, and it could be the sort of place that comes alive later at night, but I saw nothing to suggest it was worth hanging around.


Le Bistot de L'Abbe: Restaurant and Wine bar. We only stopped in for a quick beer, but I'd happily recommend it to anyone wanting to escape the bustle and noise of the other places on this list. A fine selection of wines and tastefully decorated, it's an excellent place for quieter, more intimate conversation.


White Rabbit: The place to go when 2 AM is too early for bedtime. A Jack Daniels with Coke costs 9 Euros, so you'll want to make sure you've done your drinking before you arrive, but the music is at least tolerable, occasionally "oh my god we have to dance"-able, and on one night they had a surprisingly convincing covers band playing a wide range of indie hits. Perhaps it's all a bit too obviously aimed at young English tourists, but when you're too drunk to talk and want to go somewhere to stumble around on a dancefloor, you probably won't find much better.


Yeti: A cosy, relaxed bar, attended by a reassuring number of locals, and on balance, probably the best drinking establishment in Cervino. The slightly hypnotic, over-sized screens that play a mix of American, English and Italian pop music videos can disrupt conversation, but tasty and (relatively) cheap beer go a long way toward making up for that. The staff were unfailingly friendly, gave out free nuts and crisps with every round bought, and they even had facilities for using the Internet (which I had the resolve not to test).


There was another place we went to on the main thoroughfare through town, but despite walking past it several times subsequently, I could never see that it had a name. Nonetheless, it can be easily identified by the sign flashing "LAPDANCE" outside. I was horribly drunk when we went in around 2 in the morning, and my memories of the place are incredibly hazy, but I found the following scribbled in my notepad the next day:

"Our first night in Italy and we're in a 'strip-club' that is not overtly, but almost certainly, a brothel. I buy a scantily-clad woman a drink for 15 Euros, and she talks with me while keeping her hand on my knee for around fifteen minutes. When our time is up she whispers in my ear that I might want to accompany her to the toilets; but drunk as I am, I'm not quite willing to pay for a sexual favour- despite that she's given every indication that she may be the first woman I've met who knows how to give good head."

That more-or-less says it all, except that you'll also be charged 15 Euros just to get in (although that includes a free drink), and none of the girls danced. They just loitered around the bar asking to be bought drinks. On a holiday that already cost a fairly astronomical amount, spending money on this sort of gentle titillation is something I came to regret; but I've included it here for the sake of completeness, and to assist any sex-tourists passing through this blog.

DISCLAIMER: My opinion of all the places mentioned here is based on incredibly limited experience. I reserve the right for my judgement to be proven horribly wrong.